When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation --
'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground
For any sage's creed or calculation) --
A mode of proving that the earth turned round
In a most natural whirl, called "Gravitation;"
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

Man fell with apples, and with apples rose,
If this be true ; for we must deem the mode
In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose
Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road,
A thing to counterbalance human woes ;
For ever since immortal man hath glowed
With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon
Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon.

And wherefore this exordium ? -- Why, just now,
In taking up this paltry sheet of paper,
My bosom underwent a glorious glow,
And my internal spirit cut a caper :
And though so much inferior, as I know,
To those who, by the dint of glass and vapour,
Discover stars and sail in the wind's eye,
I wish to do as much by poesy.

The steam engine did not quite bring Nineteenth Century man (and woman) to the Moon,
but it brought them close enough to imagine the voyage. Still, "poesy" remained a necessary
component of the vehicle -- as it does again, with the brief Space-Age receding into the past
at a startlingly rocket-like velocity and dwindling to the same
remoteness as the Age of Steam. Small wonder, then, that in the last third of the disappointing
Twentieth-Century a movement arose that looked back with longing on both periods at
once. This movement, eventually and perhaps unfortunately christened "Steampunk", would be
of limited interest were it only what many of its well-meaning advocates maintain that it is: a sub-genre
of science fiction depicting an alternate 1800s in which the technological advances predicted
by Wells and Verne had actually taken place.

In fact, Steampunk from its beginnings in the 1980s showed signs of becoming an independent
subculture which rejected both the mainstream values of the time and the anti-technological
bias of the "counterculture" with which it was otherwise largely in sympathy. Like most processes
of cultural development, this evolution was erratic and riddled with inconsistencies.
By the 2000s, however, some clear patterns had emerged.

Devotees of the genre had begun not merely
dressing like their favourite characters in the usual sci-fi fanboy manner,
but actually attempting
to build the kinds of machines mentioned in the novels. When
this was impossible, some strove to create works of art
depicting how such machines might look if they existed,
while others transformed everyday machines in accordance with
what they supposed to be Victorian æsthetics, making Twenty-First
Century devices that seemed to belong in an Edisonade.

Exhibition of Steampunk art at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, 2009/10.
[5 min 20 sec]

Steampunk tapped
into many reservoirs of sentiment at once:
popular nostalgia for the good old days, utopian dreams of the
possible future, youthful defiance of the adult establishment,
the survivalist ethos of self-sufficiency, but also, most surprisingly,
the nearly-extinct tradition of scientific and technological optimism.
It suggested that Nineteenth-Century authors were right to
believe that good engineering and rational thought could address
the world's problems, however little confirmatory evidence the
Twentieth Century might offer, but also that it was the
responsibility of the individual members of society to create
the ideal world themselves rather than wait for others. Nikola Tesla,
lone inventor, was the archetypal Steampunk hero.

Of course, the cult of the Nineteenth Century implicit in Steampunk
had obvious limitations: a proliferation of twee Victoriana,
a disturbing admiration for days when the sun never set
on the Union Jack, a willful ignorance of the more Taliban-like
side of the 1800s. People with
a diachronic perspective on the Age of Steam did not hesitate to point this
out. However, at least for the more thoughtful Steampunks, this
critique largely missed the point. They had never seen themselves as mere
neo-Victorians, nor even as the equivalent of Civil War re-enactors
in the United States, honouring an era while acknowledging its
darker aspects. Rather, they argued, they were celebrating, or
creating, "a past which never was," but which might have been.

The "Victorian Space-Age" was a missed opportunity, but not
one gone forever beyond reach; the best of the age could be revived
and its latent possibilities realised. Steam technology and lighter-than-air
craft could (in some rather unclear way) be made "green", the
capitalist excesses of the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries could be tamed
in the spirit of Ruskin or Kropotkin, and the civilising aspects of the
Victorian Age could prevail over its barbarisms this time around.

One might argue that these fine intentions are unrealisable. Can anyone
actually build a steam-powered spaceship? How about one deriving its power
from the luminiferous æther? Clearly, it would be unwise to wager much on
a positive answer to these questions, and at heart Steampunk is more about poesy
than about steam engines. Nevertheless, in certain areas, and
perhaps especially in robotics, some impressive results have been attained:

I-Wei Huang's steam-powered robots [3 min 22 sec]

Like all movements in popular culture, Steampunk began to
decay as soon as it became popular enough to have an impact.
It became, seemingly overnight, more of a fashion statement
than a philosophical school, although more positive aspects remain.
The music video Steampunk Revolution (below) by the band
Abney Park illustrates the popcult aspects of contemporary Steampunk,
good and bad. Steampunk in the 2010s is
excessively vaudevillian and dandified, eager to shock the (nowadays
bluejean-clad) bourgeois establishment, given to absurd nostalgia
("Out with the new, in with the old!"), unclear about any
higher purpose beyond wild revels ("We've darted back to 1886 --
don't ask us why; that's how we get our kicks!").
Lord Byron would have been delighted and joined in with enthusiasm;
his software-engineer daughter would perhaps have reacted
more coolly (and her colleague Babbage would have plugged his ears and begun
composing angry letters to The Times). But the video also
features some of the extraordinary working machinery which
Steampunks have hand-crafted, and it suggests the technophilia which
distinguishes them from most of the young utopians who have
swaggered across the Western world since the 1960s.

Steampunk's do-it-yourself past, the Thucydidean
Nineteenth-Century "as it should have been", represents
a real-world application of the cenochronic approach to
history which I have
advocated in a recent post at this site. Steampunk manifests
the deep human need for authentic communion with previous generations,
a communion based not on mindless veneration (or condemnation)
but on the power of imagination and love to conquer
time. That, I think, is the point of
the following punk/folk music video, filmed aboard the
steam-powered vehicle Neverwas Haul.

The Land of Lost Things by Renée de la Prade
with Culann's Hounds, at the Burning Man Festival, 2010.
[4 min 30 sec]